Teaching with Tocqueville: Assessing the Utility of Using “Democracy” in the American Government Classroom to Achieve Student-Learning Outcomes

Abstract

There is a debate in Political Science concerning how best to teach American Government courses. We investigate whether students learn more effectively with texts from the great tradition or from textbooks and other secondary sources. Which medium better guides students toward becoming better citizens? We examine how teaching “The Great Tradition” may increase success in student-learning outcomes. We examine four categories of learning outcomes in the Introduction to American Government classroom: general knowledge, knowledge of current events, civic engagement, and civic virtue. These outcomes were pretested and posttested with a quasi-experimental design. The experimental group studied Tocqueville's Democracy in America, while the control group studied traditional textbooks. The purpose of this project is to see if reading Tocqueville increases success in student-learning outcomes over classes that do not. We test two main sets of hypotheses. The first set concerns group/overall class improvement, and the second set deals with individual student improvement. Our results demonstrate that students’ mean improvement scores pre- to posttest increase more in the experimental sections than in the control sections for the general knowledge, civic engagement, and civic virtue learning components. This research suggests a return to the “classics” as a pedagogical innovation.

Keywords:

• assessment
• civic engagement
• civic virtue
• pedagogy
• Tocqueville

Notes

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Understanding what liberty means depends upon which historical era one is writing in. For our purposes, it has to do with the parts of the soul and not allowing one part to gain too much dominance over the other two parts. This clearly relates back to the separation of powers and checks and balances within the American Constitution. See, for instance, Mansfield (1993a).

Tocqueville's concept of self-interest rightly or well understood is discussed below.

Interesting how this paragraph today would be one party's dream and another's nightmare. Tocqueville is even more relevant in the classroom today than ever; this paragraph makes for some interesting classroom discussions.

We are not asserting that this tradition is how American ideals have operated, only that it is what Tocqueville believes a republic with America's habits of heart should emphasize. To understand what America has focused on, as juxtaposed to Tocqueville, see, for instance, R. M. Smith (1997). Perhaps unknowingly, Smith describes the United States as that government completely that Tocqueville fears. Although Smith argues against Tocqueville's understanding of the United States, he actually proves Tocqueville's fear of tyranny, either popular or governmental, in all its inequality and injustices.

To increase reliability, various questions were borrowed from Champney and Edleman (2010) and Reinke (2003).